Well, yeah. But it gave me a good opportunity to articulate some thoughts about the elite trend toward this sort of arrogant assumption-based situational consequentialism.
Sounds like we should not call rage-bait podcasters "elites". I mean, what precisely do you expect when you're making this sort of broad category error? It's like raging at "scientists" because the meth-lab operator next door keeps setting his garage on fire.
To elaborate, we live in a degenerate culture where the willingness to produce rage-bait is rewarded with attention and money. The more the argument enrages us, the more we amplify it and the more attention it gets. We could choose to accept these people for who they are -- not elected officials, not people with real power, just trolls who make money by making us angry. We could ignore them and deny them the amplification they crave, which would make them functionally irrelevant.
Or, alternatively, we could give in to the perfectly-crafted ragebait, like most of Substack is doing in my timeline and in this post.
It's bad enough to see this stuff working on the low-level Substack commenters, but Noah makes his living doing this. He genuinely is one of the elite and he could make different choices. But I guess he's part of the attention ecosystem as well, and this sort of content is quick and easy to churn out.
It is $#!+ like this explains why MAGA is anything more than a 10% fringe minority! 😠 It's awfully hard to NOT win a poker hand in which you are dealt 3 of a kind…but the Democrats keep coming up with ways to discard 2 of the 3 cards to keep the hand close! 🙄
It's stunning that elite Ivy undergrad weed driven dorm lounge philosphizing has not only gotten out into the wild but gets published.
While this may be marginal, commentators saying just ignore it are wrong. Just ignore it with eyeroll helped the Wokey Woke propagate and got us MAGA on steroids.
It’s awful hard to have a society above the purely survival level if there isn’t some sort of social contract, and “don’t steal” is high on the list if you want any kind of function. Even pre-literate, foraging societies usually had some kind of rule/law that punished or at least discouraged stealing.
Obviously, shoplifting is bad and Piker is awful. Nobody outside of a few small bubbles believes it's ok. Even the most left-wing cities are clamping down hard on it and good for them.
I like your newsletter and you can write about whatever you want, but I don't think it's worth it to give those idiots any time. Almost nobody has any idea who they are. Even I hadn't heard of Tolentino and I'm terminally online.
If Democratic candidates start saying shoplifting is okay, I will worry, but I don't think that's going to happen. This whole discourse is exclusively an online phenomenon. There's nothing inherently wrong with taking part in online discourse, but it's important to remember how small of a world those of us who know about it live in.
Heh. Yes, but the more general approach of situational ethics based on strong, epistemically closed assumptions about statistical consequences needs to be criticized, and this was a good opportunity to criticize it.
You sound like me in the eighties when I was critiquing modern Chinese communist literature: it takes a lot of big words to say something much smaller.
Direct quote from Anti Defamation League: "As of April 2026, Piker has a combined total of around 11.3 million followers across social media platforms." Maybe they exaggerate, and there must be some overlap, but it is easy to confirm his 3M on Twitch, almost 2M on YouTube, and 2M on Instagram.
As Noah pointed out, many if not most of the are not American. I also would not take anything from the ADL at face value. They're not good faith actors in the antisemitism debate.
Don't think we're debating anti-semitism here. We 're trying to appreciate the magnitude of "influencers" like Piker's ...influence. You say it is small, and that most of his followers are foreigners (who have somehow developed a fascination with US politics) and therefore nothing to worry about. The barbarians are assuredly NOT at the gates!
There are plenty of things to worry about, but Piker is not one of them. He's not worth fretting over. I don't like the current version of the left and think they're right about almost nothing, but not every leftist figure is the same.
I write about these kinds of things fairly often in my newsletter below. Check it out.
Even if no Democratic candidates say this, Fox News at al Will quote the media personalities who do say it, and claim that all Democrats believe this. I've run into lots of posts on sub stack where conservatives attribute all sorts of crazy positions to Democrats, and when I ask them to name a specific politician or candidate who said this, they can't, but they continue to believe it anyway.
They did already, and voted for Trump due to progressives owning the rapidly senile Biden administration. Remember when Biden violated Title IX with an executive action on day one? A majority of Americans did.
So called “normal, non-political people,” are certainly watching Fox News. You would be surprised at the number of college educated people who mainly get their news from Fox. It has a lot to do with what happened to this country.
You may have missed it when Democrats did in fact pick up on “Defund the Police” slogans by these exact same progressives. Part of the consequences of the obvious rise in shoplifting and smash-and-grab and many other forms of crime, was the recall and defeat of progressive DAs and mayors even in the bluest of blue cities (San Francisco, Oakland, LA), and a second Trump term. It’s worth spending time on, because progressives are who got us two Trump administrations.
Huh? The point is that even in the leftist cities progressives got recalled and defeated for the fact that everything they touch turns to shit.
The progressives infesting the Biden administration set us all up for Trump 2. As for your ignorant challenge, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, AOC, Jamaal Bowman, Ayanna Presley, Rashida Tlaib, all elected Democrats in the House, and Biden’s assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke all supported Defund the Police. Should I continue?
Clark never supported Defund the Police. She wrote an article for Newsweek which was given that title by the editors, but she did not approve that title. While in office she helped to enact Biden program to increase funding for police
Biden himself repeatedly rejected "defund the police" and in fact passed bills that provide extra federal funding for states that wanted to spend more money on the police.
Sure, though Biden himself violated Title IX by executive order on his first day of office as a present to progressives, but let’s put that aside.
Clearly progressives want to memory hole their stupidity, so I’ll point out mayors that actually followed through on defunding law enforcement: Eric Garcetti, Bill de Blasio. The genius wanted me to name elected Democratic officials so I think I covered a lot.
Fully agree. I’ve followed Jia for a long time, and find her usually to be a thoughtful writer. This was a poor take…but to me, just that. A take. Not a representation of the Democratic Party platform, or even something they should concern themselves with.
(Piker on the other hand, is as Noah rightly describes, a pure attention seeking “shock jock”)
Shrugging and eye-rolling in the Wokey-woke period got us here.
Idiotic Ivy college dorm room philosophizing out in the wild needs to be slapped down or it will propagate. That's the lesson I take from the late 2010s-early2020s.
Piker is a nepo baby - a literal nepo (nephew) to Cenk Uygur, and we know what he named that YouTube/TV show of his after. Shock jockery (if that’s a word) runs in that family.
Tolerating petty crime is one of the dumbest things democracies can do. It is amazing micro-celebs like Piker and Tolentino can have such stupid beliefs. No wonder Trump won.
Gotta bang my drum for the BART (local train system) fare gates that are made to discourage “fare jumping:” They work, not just by making people pay their fares (and increasing revenue), but, hours spent on station maintenance is down, trains are cleaner, safer, quieter, and you don’t have to check a seat in the back of the car before sit down in case there is ground in Mickey D’s ketchup or worse (a LOT worse, as in human waste). It turns out that people who are willing to break the social contract in one instance (fare evasion) are all too willing to break it in others (harassing fellow passengers, blasting music without earphones, getting food on the seats, *urinating* on the seats, littering everywhere, pissing in the escalators).
What’s nice is now ridership is up - ridership of nice law-abiding people who treat public property and fellow passengers with respect.
There really is something to the “broken windows” theory.
I surmise you wrote this because the Cartoons Hate Her commentariat overlaps with yours quite a bit (or at least is a homing ground for normie libs), not because, I hope, people took the obnoxious nepo baby seriously. (Unless you were called upon to give a lecture at your local middle school. 12 year olds can have some peculiar ideas.) Hasan Piker, much as he might like to be against The Man, is, in fact, The Man. Just like most of the OG Communists came from nice middle-class backgrounds.
Americans visit cities in Scandinavia, or the Netherlands, or Japan, and wonder why America can’t have the nice things these countries - or at least the large cities in these countries - can. The answer is “social trust.” And how do you get social trust? By, among other things, not stealing just because you can, or because it’s going to somehow stick it to Jeff Bezos. If we want the kind of society most liberals - hell, most sane conservatives too - want, then we have to have that social trust. Lack of social trust is part of the reason we got Trump (and of course he’s played that like a fiddle, creating worse distrust).
Yes.. a very key economic idea "social trust." I don't frequent places such as NYC, SF... but in the places where I live (suburbs in US)... social trust is quite high. ideas such as "social trust," "concern for the common good," and "common values around fairness" tend to be fundamental in economic development and growth of a society.
One has only to look to the problems in same countries in immigrant neighborhoods - lack of social trust. This is not beat on immigrants as immigrants (or unassimilatable discourse) but assimilation into social trust norms / rebuilding of the same is very critical.
The Anarcho-Lefty Trust nobody-Libertarian-Rightyism since the70s has been a toxic bath.
God these people are so irritating. What caused me to lose my mind when I watched this podcast was not outrage over the immorality and economic illiteracy of their positions, because as you note it’s pretty clear they are not literally or strongly held. They’re just LARPing bimbos who think it makes them look cool. It bothers me most that the New York Times structured this discussion from the start as a facile validation of the premise - it never gets beyond taking the most simplistic assumptions at face value, like the idea that corporations paying lower than expected taxes due to lawfully writing off capital expenditures or whatever, a democratically agreed upon feature of our tax code which whether you believe it is working or not has an intended purpose of promoting growth, is morally the same as an individual (a wealthy individual for the purposes of this podcast) stealing from a corporation, which has no intended positive effect on society. We are so close to taking the country back from MAGA lunatics and institutions like the NYT are determined to continue to normalize lunatic exhibitionists to represent our tribe. Please just shut up!
This is spot on. One of the things that drives me up the wall is the tendency of a particular type of leftist to defend breaking the law with the claim that rich people like Jeff Bezos are committing crimes and the "crimes" are perfectly legal. Yes, some unethical things are legal, but there is a big difference between not breaking the law and breaking the law. If leftists think some of this stuff should be illegal, they are more than welcome to try to change the law.
There's a weird thing going on with the idea of rich people not playing by the rules where often times the rules that the rich are violating are rules that most of society doesn't consider rules, it's just a particular type of affluent leftist who thinks they're rules, things like "you should never shop at Amazon".
This needed to be said because the New York Times gave it prominence. It also needed to be said because the free press did not do a good job of explaining why it was so terrible. At bottom, it is simply a self indictment by the editors of the New York Times.
Well as Noah’s last column about Piker said, Ezra Klein thinks it’s a good idea to bring Piker into the Democratic tent, so they are following through.
This is the real question. I can only think it is happening because he is friends or runs in the same circles as some of the writers so some of them may think he is more important than he actually is. Or they think the far, far left will actually read their news or come into the flock of reasonable people to win elections. I have no idea tbh, it is just baffling.
How much of this is downstream of how rich pseudo lefty progressives imagine who criminals are? It feels like they read Oliver Twist and never updated their priors. All criminals including murderers are just Dickensian victims of greater social crimes not opportunistic people who think they can get away with getting something for free while someone else pays the cost. I worked at McDonalds for about 6 years and several people I worked with had committed crimes and been to prison. When asked about this they would say “oh yeah I deserved to go man…I was a fucking idiot.”
I have a friend, retired after decades as a district attorney, who said that most “career criminals” (as opposed to the Young and Dumb who try it once) are stupid, too stupid to get a real job. Because there is actually a lot more job security, upward mobility, and respectability even in a fast food job. When you look at “returns to working at Mickey D’s” versus “returns to criminality” Mickey D’s wins. Even if it’s not a job most people want or crave, it’s still a respectable job that you can put on your resume.
I wonder how the protagonists would react to being robbed or mugged for some perceived affront or perhaps on retaliation for their sanctioned “micro looting”. Funny how they can justify such lawless action when most people want to work hard and be able to provide safety and security for their family and friends and enjoy the fruit of their labor such as an item or good that they purchased and own.
Piker et al are actually the elite they denigrate and are so far removed from reality that they can’t see how foolish they are. Thanks Noah for spelling it out in real terms
Why I commented on Cartoons that these clowns should be assigned their own micro-looting squad - pickpockets and similar - to see how long their arch pretence holds up.
Not only that, Piker is using the same logic as Hoffman - by stealing his book you hurt the big publishing company, but he already got paid for writing it, so the theft doesn’t hurt him. Piker puts out stupid and reprehensible ideas but profits from it on his Twitch platform.
"Do you understand anything I'm saying?" shouted Moist. "You can't just go around killing people!"
"Why Not? You Do." The golem lowered his arm.
"What?" Moist. "I do not! Who told you that?"
"I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People," said the golem calmly.
"I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr. Pump. I may be--all the things you know I am, but I am *not* a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!"
"No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded, And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr. Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Did Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr. Lipvig. For The Joy Of The Game."
Hard to find a better type of intellectual. There was a moment in American culture when the liberals' idea of an intellectual was Al Gore and the conservatives' ides was Newt Gingrich.
Both of those characters fail the "would leave them alone to housesit my cat" or "would let them take my 7 year old to lunch" tests. If we just applied that kind of thought experiment it would remove all sorts of bad and crazy from policy influence and elected positions.
Who are the corporate Shareholders? One is non-billionnaire me. When I was younger, rather than spending every penny I earned, I made some investments which turned out to be good ones. Now I reap the benefits of that, which could be jeopardized by declining stock prices.
And, I too often pick up small items at Amazon so I can read labels and make comparisons without an impatient-looking store employee standing by.
I cant believe you had to write this article. Jeez
Well, yeah. But it gave me a good opportunity to articulate some thoughts about the elite trend toward this sort of arrogant assumption-based situational consequentialism.
Sounds like we need some new elites
If you find some, let me know
Sounds like we should not call rage-bait podcasters "elites". I mean, what precisely do you expect when you're making this sort of broad category error? It's like raging at "scientists" because the meth-lab operator next door keeps setting his garage on fire.
I'm sorry, but what else do you call millionaire cultural influencers with millions of fans?
Trolls?
To elaborate, we live in a degenerate culture where the willingness to produce rage-bait is rewarded with attention and money. The more the argument enrages us, the more we amplify it and the more attention it gets. We could choose to accept these people for who they are -- not elected officials, not people with real power, just trolls who make money by making us angry. We could ignore them and deny them the amplification they crave, which would make them functionally irrelevant.
Or, alternatively, we could give in to the perfectly-crafted ragebait, like most of Substack is doing in my timeline and in this post.
It's bad enough to see this stuff working on the low-level Substack commenters, but Noah makes his living doing this. He genuinely is one of the elite and he could make different choices. But I guess he's part of the attention ecosystem as well, and this sort of content is quick and easy to churn out.
Wait, so Noah is an elite, but Piker and Tolentino aren't. Tolentino writes for The New Yorker.
I hate these trolls as much as you do, but unfortunately they are being interviewed on NYTimes, not Noah.
It is $#!+ like this explains why MAGA is anything more than a 10% fringe minority! 😠 It's awfully hard to NOT win a poker hand in which you are dealt 3 of a kind…but the Democrats keep coming up with ways to discard 2 of the 3 cards to keep the hand close! 🙄
It's stunning that elite Ivy undergrad weed driven dorm lounge philosphizing has not only gotten out into the wild but gets published.
While this may be marginal, commentators saying just ignore it are wrong. Just ignore it with eyeroll helped the Wokey Woke propagate and got us MAGA on steroids.
This is what the galaxy brain meme was invented for.
You, a gen-x boursgeouisi : stealing is wrong
Me, an intellectual: microlooting is praxis
That this needs to be said is… well.. something. Well said.
It’s awful hard to have a society above the purely survival level if there isn’t some sort of social contract, and “don’t steal” is high on the list if you want any kind of function. Even pre-literate, foraging societies usually had some kind of rule/law that punished or at least discouraged stealing.
I think there’s been a few other relevant ones in between by Victor Hugo and on Broadway.
Obviously, shoplifting is bad and Piker is awful. Nobody outside of a few small bubbles believes it's ok. Even the most left-wing cities are clamping down hard on it and good for them.
I like your newsletter and you can write about whatever you want, but I don't think it's worth it to give those idiots any time. Almost nobody has any idea who they are. Even I hadn't heard of Tolentino and I'm terminally online.
If Democratic candidates start saying shoplifting is okay, I will worry, but I don't think that's going to happen. This whole discourse is exclusively an online phenomenon. There's nothing inherently wrong with taking part in online discourse, but it's important to remember how small of a world those of us who know about it live in.
Heh. Yes, but the more general approach of situational ethics based on strong, epistemically closed assumptions about statistical consequences needs to be criticized, and this was a good opportunity to criticize it.
You sound like me in the eighties when I was critiquing modern Chinese communist literature: it takes a lot of big words to say something much smaller.
Ha. Oh man.
Piker has 11 million followers across all social media platforms. To state that "nobody has any idea who" he is seems like whistling in the graveyard.
I highly doubt that.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/hasan-piker-is-bad-for-the-democrats
Direct quote from Anti Defamation League: "As of April 2026, Piker has a combined total of around 11.3 million followers across social media platforms." Maybe they exaggerate, and there must be some overlap, but it is easy to confirm his 3M on Twitch, almost 2M on YouTube, and 2M on Instagram.
As Noah pointed out, many if not most of the are not American. I also would not take anything from the ADL at face value. They're not good faith actors in the antisemitism debate.
Don't think we're debating anti-semitism here. We 're trying to appreciate the magnitude of "influencers" like Piker's ...influence. You say it is small, and that most of his followers are foreigners (who have somehow developed a fascination with US politics) and therefore nothing to worry about. The barbarians are assuredly NOT at the gates!
Wouldn't it be lovely to think so?
There are plenty of things to worry about, but Piker is not one of them. He's not worth fretting over. I don't like the current version of the left and think they're right about almost nothing, but not every leftist figure is the same.
I write about these kinds of things fairly often in my newsletter below. Check it out.
https://coldpoliticaltakes.substack.com/
Even if no Democratic candidates say this, Fox News at al Will quote the media personalities who do say it, and claim that all Democrats believe this. I've run into lots of posts on sub stack where conservatives attribute all sorts of crazy positions to Democrats, and when I ask them to name a specific politician or candidate who said this, they can't, but they continue to believe it anyway.
Fox watchers don't decide elections. They can think whatever they want. When normal, non-political people start believing it that's the time to worry.
They did already, and voted for Trump due to progressives owning the rapidly senile Biden administration. Remember when Biden violated Title IX with an executive action on day one? A majority of Americans did.
So called “normal, non-political people,” are certainly watching Fox News. You would be surprised at the number of college educated people who mainly get their news from Fox. It has a lot to do with what happened to this country.
You may have missed it when Democrats did in fact pick up on “Defund the Police” slogans by these exact same progressives. Part of the consequences of the obvious rise in shoplifting and smash-and-grab and many other forms of crime, was the recall and defeat of progressive DAs and mayors even in the bluest of blue cities (San Francisco, Oakland, LA), and a second Trump term. It’s worth spending time on, because progressives are who got us two Trump administrations.
Name one non-leftist elected official who did that. Not everyone lives in San Francisco.
Huh? The point is that even in the leftist cities progressives got recalled and defeated for the fact that everything they touch turns to shit.
The progressives infesting the Biden administration set us all up for Trump 2. As for your ignorant challenge, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, AOC, Jamaal Bowman, Ayanna Presley, Rashida Tlaib, all elected Democrats in the House, and Biden’s assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke all supported Defund the Police. Should I continue?
https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-committee/assistant-ag-nominee-kristen-clarke-defends-op-ed-on-police-funding/4958594
Clark never supported Defund the Police. She wrote an article for Newsweek which was given that title by the editors, but she did not approve that title. While in office she helped to enact Biden program to increase funding for police
Biden himself repeatedly rejected "defund the police" and in fact passed bills that provide extra federal funding for states that wanted to spend more money on the police.
Sure, though Biden himself violated Title IX by executive order on his first day of office as a present to progressives, but let’s put that aside.
Clearly progressives want to memory hole their stupidity, so I’ll point out mayors that actually followed through on defunding law enforcement: Eric Garcetti, Bill de Blasio. The genius wanted me to name elected Democratic officials so I think I covered a lot.
The entire Memory Hole Archive at American Dreaming is worth reading, but this one is for you: https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/memory-hole-archive-political-violence
Fully agree. I’ve followed Jia for a long time, and find her usually to be a thoughtful writer. This was a poor take…but to me, just that. A take. Not a representation of the Democratic Party platform, or even something they should concern themselves with.
(Piker on the other hand, is as Noah rightly describes, a pure attention seeking “shock jock”)
Shrugging and eye-rolling in the Wokey-woke period got us here.
Idiotic Ivy college dorm room philosophizing out in the wild needs to be slapped down or it will propagate. That's the lesson I take from the late 2010s-early2020s.
Piker is a nepo baby - a literal nepo (nephew) to Cenk Uygur, and we know what he named that YouTube/TV show of his after. Shock jockery (if that’s a word) runs in that family.
Tolerating petty crime is one of the dumbest things democracies can do. It is amazing micro-celebs like Piker and Tolentino can have such stupid beliefs. No wonder Trump won.
Just solve and punish petty crime!
Gotta bang my drum for the BART (local train system) fare gates that are made to discourage “fare jumping:” They work, not just by making people pay their fares (and increasing revenue), but, hours spent on station maintenance is down, trains are cleaner, safer, quieter, and you don’t have to check a seat in the back of the car before sit down in case there is ground in Mickey D’s ketchup or worse (a LOT worse, as in human waste). It turns out that people who are willing to break the social contract in one instance (fare evasion) are all too willing to break it in others (harassing fellow passengers, blasting music without earphones, getting food on the seats, *urinating* on the seats, littering everywhere, pissing in the escalators).
What’s nice is now ridership is up - ridership of nice law-abiding people who treat public property and fellow passengers with respect.
There really is something to the “broken windows” theory.
I surmise you wrote this because the Cartoons Hate Her commentariat overlaps with yours quite a bit (or at least is a homing ground for normie libs), not because, I hope, people took the obnoxious nepo baby seriously. (Unless you were called upon to give a lecture at your local middle school. 12 year olds can have some peculiar ideas.) Hasan Piker, much as he might like to be against The Man, is, in fact, The Man. Just like most of the OG Communists came from nice middle-class backgrounds.
Americans visit cities in Scandinavia, or the Netherlands, or Japan, and wonder why America can’t have the nice things these countries - or at least the large cities in these countries - can. The answer is “social trust.” And how do you get social trust? By, among other things, not stealing just because you can, or because it’s going to somehow stick it to Jeff Bezos. If we want the kind of society most liberals - hell, most sane conservatives too - want, then we have to have that social trust. Lack of social trust is part of the reason we got Trump (and of course he’s played that like a fiddle, creating worse distrust).
Yes.. a very key economic idea "social trust." I don't frequent places such as NYC, SF... but in the places where I live (suburbs in US)... social trust is quite high. ideas such as "social trust," "concern for the common good," and "common values around fairness" tend to be fundamental in economic development and growth of a society.
One has only to look to the problems in same countries in immigrant neighborhoods - lack of social trust. This is not beat on immigrants as immigrants (or unassimilatable discourse) but assimilation into social trust norms / rebuilding of the same is very critical.
The Anarcho-Lefty Trust nobody-Libertarian-Rightyism since the70s has been a toxic bath.
"Their mental models of economics and politics are a dense tangle of undergrad-level misunderstandings, leftist memes, and political talking points"
Thanks Noah, exactly correct.
Both our left and right wing friends allow their emotions and confirmation bias to overrule a reasoned search for knowledge, reality and truth.
God these people are so irritating. What caused me to lose my mind when I watched this podcast was not outrage over the immorality and economic illiteracy of their positions, because as you note it’s pretty clear they are not literally or strongly held. They’re just LARPing bimbos who think it makes them look cool. It bothers me most that the New York Times structured this discussion from the start as a facile validation of the premise - it never gets beyond taking the most simplistic assumptions at face value, like the idea that corporations paying lower than expected taxes due to lawfully writing off capital expenditures or whatever, a democratically agreed upon feature of our tax code which whether you believe it is working or not has an intended purpose of promoting growth, is morally the same as an individual (a wealthy individual for the purposes of this podcast) stealing from a corporation, which has no intended positive effect on society. We are so close to taking the country back from MAGA lunatics and institutions like the NYT are determined to continue to normalize lunatic exhibitionists to represent our tribe. Please just shut up!
This is spot on. One of the things that drives me up the wall is the tendency of a particular type of leftist to defend breaking the law with the claim that rich people like Jeff Bezos are committing crimes and the "crimes" are perfectly legal. Yes, some unethical things are legal, but there is a big difference between not breaking the law and breaking the law. If leftists think some of this stuff should be illegal, they are more than welcome to try to change the law.
There's a weird thing going on with the idea of rich people not playing by the rules where often times the rules that the rich are violating are rules that most of society doesn't consider rules, it's just a particular type of affluent leftist who thinks they're rules, things like "you should never shop at Amazon".
YES - LARPing.... that puts the finger on it (well LARPing bimbos esp. as Pretty People playing Cosplay radical posturing).
This needed to be said because the New York Times gave it prominence. It also needed to be said because the free press did not do a good job of explaining why it was so terrible. At bottom, it is simply a self indictment by the editors of the New York Times.
Why is the NYT giving Piker a forum? That's really bad.
Well as Noah’s last column about Piker said, Ezra Klein thinks it’s a good idea to bring Piker into the Democratic tent, so they are following through.
This is the real question. I can only think it is happening because he is friends or runs in the same circles as some of the writers so some of them may think he is more important than he actually is. Or they think the far, far left will actually read their news or come into the flock of reasonable people to win elections. I have no idea tbh, it is just baffling.
How much of this is downstream of how rich pseudo lefty progressives imagine who criminals are? It feels like they read Oliver Twist and never updated their priors. All criminals including murderers are just Dickensian victims of greater social crimes not opportunistic people who think they can get away with getting something for free while someone else pays the cost. I worked at McDonalds for about 6 years and several people I worked with had committed crimes and been to prison. When asked about this they would say “oh yeah I deserved to go man…I was a fucking idiot.”
I have a friend, retired after decades as a district attorney, who said that most “career criminals” (as opposed to the Young and Dumb who try it once) are stupid, too stupid to get a real job. Because there is actually a lot more job security, upward mobility, and respectability even in a fast food job. When you look at “returns to working at Mickey D’s” versus “returns to criminality” Mickey D’s wins. Even if it’s not a job most people want or crave, it’s still a respectable job that you can put on your resume.
I wonder how the protagonists would react to being robbed or mugged for some perceived affront or perhaps on retaliation for their sanctioned “micro looting”. Funny how they can justify such lawless action when most people want to work hard and be able to provide safety and security for their family and friends and enjoy the fruit of their labor such as an item or good that they purchased and own.
Piker et al are actually the elite they denigrate and are so far removed from reality that they can’t see how foolish they are. Thanks Noah for spelling it out in real terms
You just *know* they’d scream “LOCK HIM UP!” Rules for what happens to me but definitely not what happens to thee because Thou Art The Man.
Why I commented on Cartoons that these clowns should be assigned their own micro-looting squad - pickpockets and similar - to see how long their arch pretence holds up.
"I have only shoplifted one thing in my entire life: a copy of Abbie Hoffman’s book Steal This Book."
Noah, does this factoid indicate that you are dangerously suggestible?
Not only that, Piker is using the same logic as Hoffman - by stealing his book you hurt the big publishing company, but he already got paid for writing it, so the theft doesn’t hurt him. Piker puts out stupid and reprehensible ideas but profits from it on his Twitch platform.
Piker is nothing but a new generation of shock jock. I hope plenty of people find him a fitting object of larceny.
Heh! I remember when "Steal This Book" came out. The publisher withdrew it from sale because ... too many of them were being stolen. (drum roll)
"Do you understand anything I'm saying?" shouted Moist. "You can't just go around killing people!"
"Why Not? You Do." The golem lowered his arm.
"What?" Moist. "I do not! Who told you that?"
"I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People," said the golem calmly.
"I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr. Pump. I may be--all the things you know I am, but I am *not* a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!"
"No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded, And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr. Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Did Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr. Lipvig. For The Joy Of The Game."
--Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
While I agree with all of this, can I suggest an alternative title?
“Why having click-hungry dildos as the ‘intellectuals’ of a movement is dumb as shit”
Hard to find a better type of intellectual. There was a moment in American culture when the liberals' idea of an intellectual was Al Gore and the conservatives' ides was Newt Gingrich.
Both of those characters fail the "would leave them alone to housesit my cat" or "would let them take my 7 year old to lunch" tests. If we just applied that kind of thought experiment it would remove all sorts of bad and crazy from policy influence and elected positions.
Who are the corporate Shareholders? One is non-billionnaire me. When I was younger, rather than spending every penny I earned, I made some investments which turned out to be good ones. Now I reap the benefits of that, which could be jeopardized by declining stock prices.
And, I too often pick up small items at Amazon so I can read labels and make comparisons without an impatient-looking store employee standing by.